Barney's Blog

Doug's Mailbag: IPv4 Addresses Almost Gone, PowerShell Thoughts

Like many organizations, my employer has plenty of IPv4 addresses -- for now (it's like the cell companies that hoard telephone numbers). That's really not the challenge, though. The challenge is all of the layers of network hardware and software which have to be IPv6-ready: firewalls, routers, servers. If you turn on IPv6 in an IPv4-dominant environment, you run into latency problems when the software searches for IPv6 traffic. This slows down performance on IPv4 devices -- so, until there is a 'critical mass' of IPv6 traffic, the temptation is to build IPv6-to-IPv4 'tunnels,' which just puts off the inevitable.

It will still take MONTHS or YEARS before enough people use IPv6 every day for the industry to step up to the plate and complete their conversion. Then it will be a mad-house.
-Marc

Maybe I'm still living in the 20th century but your statement "And because many admins do everything through PowerShell anyway, the GUI isn't missed at all" certainly does not apply to my organization. If I wanted to be a script guru, I'd probably be running Linux. I started in Windows (many years ago), and still use Windows because of the GUI. It makes it simple to use and administer. I don't have time to figure out a script for every little thing I need to do in A/D or Exchange. I'm sure PowerShell has its place, and maybe our organization is just not large enough to appreciate it, but it seems MS is going backwards, not forwards in getting away from the GUI.-Jim

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